Abstract
In response to the growing need for more relevant school history, the notion of historical consciousness has come to represent a way to help students understand the links between past, present, and future. However, translating the construct into practice in an ongoing puzzle in the field. Recently, efforts have been made to operationalize historical consciousness via a competency-based approach, but this is arguably problematic, because its proponents view historical consciousness as a hermeneutic quest for meaning yet operationalize it as a set path of mental processing. This article explores a different approach based on meaning-making practice. It does so through an extensive review and synthesis of the relevant literature, and based on the results, it suggests operationalizing historical consciousness through negotiating the presence of the past, inquiring about the past with the help of disciplinary and everyday habits of mind, and building a sense of historical being.
Lately, the field of research on history education has paid a great deal of attention to making school history more relevant for students. This is generally considered a timely task for history educators and researchers alike, as recently showcased in the 2019 EuroClio (European Association of History Educators) Annual Conference, titled Bringing History to Life, where members came together to discuss two questions: “How can we better engage students in history?” and “How can we make history teaching meaningful for them?” (De Julio, 2019). Research shows that students generally have difficulty seeing the value of school history and how it relates to their lives. Studies suggest that many struggle to grasp the purpose or importance of learning history (Haydn & Harris, 2010; Lee & Howson, 2009; Van Straaten et al., 2015, 2018), or alternatively, are able to recognize its interest, but feel dismissed or disengaged from the way it is taught in schools (Angvik & von Borries, 1997; Grever et al., 2011; Traille, 2007; VanSledright, 2011; Virta, 2016). In the attempt to make history more relevant, a constructivist pedagogical approach has increasingly been promoted in curricula, studied by researchers, and used in classrooms over the past decades (Carretero et al., 2017; Davies, 2017; Köster et al., 2014). According to this approach, history should be taught as a form of thought and inquiry into human life in time. It should aim to help students become engaged thinkers who can examine historical sources and understand how historical knowledge is produced and contested, as well as reflective agents who understand how history shapes the world they live in and how they are themselves actors within ongoing historical developments. As part of the ongoing conversation about aims, content, and instructional strategies that make historical learning more relevant, scholars have developed various notions, namely, historical thinking, historical understanding, historical reasoning, historical literacy, historical mindedness, use-of-history, historical empathy, historical agency, historical identity, heritage education, historical narrative, and historical consciousness. Although they often with overlapping meanings and implications, these notions hold great potential to rethink school history so as to make it more relevant to students’ lives.
This article focuses on historical consciousness, but the construct is broadly conceptualized as meaning-making practice, and this review thus includes notions that are commonly considered outside of what is typically conceived of as historical consciousness. Historical consciousness is generally viewed as a process by which people understand the links between past, present, and future to position themselves in time (Clark & Grever, 2018; Clark & Peck, 2019; Karlsson, 2011; Körber, 2015; Lee, 2004; Rüsen, 2004, 2012; Seixas, 2012, 2017; Van Straaten et al., 2015; von Borries, 2011; Zanazanian & Nordgren, 2019). The concept is rooted in various traditions of modern Western philosophy and historical thought, namely, idealism, historicism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology. These traditions posit history as a form of experience or mode of existence. This perspective was mainly adopted by theorists and researchers in West Germany in the 1960s to 1970s, the first to conceptualize the notion of historical consciousness for history education (Ahonen, 2001; Rüsen, 1987). Interest in historical consciousness in educational research increased in Germany during the 1980s and expanded during the 1990s to other countries following a large-scale, cross-cultural, quantitative study into European youth’s historical consciousness, and construction of historical meaning (Angvik & von Borries, 1997). In the 1990s, historical consciousness became a widely used concept in international scholarship and even an explicit curricular goal in different countries. At the turn of the 2000s, it was viewed as a chief component in what was termed the “new enterprise known as research on history teaching and learning” (Stearns et al., 2000, p. 5). Since then, significant international efforts have been made to theorize the notion in English (Seixas, 2004). Today, history educationists around the world discuss the concept by drawing on historical theory, educational psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and also interdisciplinary fields such as memory and heritage studies, media studies, and museum studies.
Interest in the educational implications of historical consciousness has been blooming and there is minimal dispute over its importance. However, translating the theoretical construct to teaching and learning is a pressing concern. As a leading scholar states, the field is currently faced with the “challenge in moving from the theoretical to an educational program [ . . . ] a framework that would offer guidance for developing young people’s understanding” (Seixas, 2017, p. 61). That being said, important efforts have recently been made to operationalize historical consciousness for educational purposes. Following from pressures to promote standardized domain-specific competences, the idea of a historical sense-making competence has become especially influential at a curricular level in various countries. The appeal of this competency-based approach is attributable to recent trends in educational discourse, driven by desires for measurable outcomes and real-world learning goals like critical thinking, methodological inquiry skills, and multiperspectival understanding (Körber, 2015). In this respect, research has investigated levels of knowledge, developmental processes, learning achievements, forms of assessment, and teaching practices for such a competence. Scholars have produced frameworks that draw on historical consciousness to elaborate a historical competence. These have been produced, for example, by scholars in Canada (Duquette, 2015); Austria, Germany, and Switzerland (Körber & Meyer-Hamme, 2015; Waldis et al., 2015); and Sweden (Eliasson et al., 2015). These mostly emphasize higher order mental processes of historical thinking and/or narrative thinking, namely, being able to devise and deal with historical questions; to review and develop historical judgments; to examine, interpret, and evaluate historical sources; and to know and use historical concepts and categories as well as epistemological and procedural concepts. These frameworks, or “competence models” (Körber, 2015), serve to translate historical consciousness into explicit, measurable, and transferable learning objectives that can be taught and evaluated in a systematic way.
While these models of historical competence are undoubtedly useful, they tend to adopt a cognitive developmental standpoint. They view historical consciousness as a set of clear-cut mental operations that serve to effectively respond to a situation in the context of historical learning, or in other words to adequately address cognitive difficulties by thinking historically or narratively. Several scholars have already expressed concerns with regard to operationalizing historical consciousness in this manner (Friedrich, 2014; Grever & Adriaansen, 2019; Nordgren, 2019; Thorp & Persson, 2020), because it fails recognize how relationships between people, cultural tools, practices, situations, contexts, and communities shape historical meaning making, and thus how students learn history. There is arguably a tension between, on one hand, viewing historical consciousness as an existential and hermeneutic quest for meaning that encompasses a vast, rich, and ambiguous array of ways in which people and societies situate themselves in time and represent their past to themselves and others; and on the other hand, operationalizing pedagogical goals and practices in terms of a precise, narrow set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to carry out cognitive procedures that model those of the academic discipline. The intention of this article is not to give a systematic review of where the field stands on the topic of historical consciousness. Rather it seeks to explore what the field knows about meaning making and, based on this knowledge, to propose a more actionable conceptualization of historical consciousness.
Guiding Perspectives and Methods for the Review
In this review, I define historical consciousness as a disposition to engage with history so as to make meaning of past human experience for oneself, or in other words, to make the historical past one’s own. This disposition is manifested in three interrelated abilities—sensitivity toward the past, understanding of the past, representation of oneself in relation to history—and each ability is associated with a particular meaning-making process—respectively, experiencing historical temporality, interpreting historical material, and orientating in practical life through history. This definition is strongly inspired by Boix Mansilla and Gardner’s (2007) and Nordgren and Johansson’s (2015) understandings of historical consciousness. In examining how the construct of global consciousness applies to classroom instruction in different subjects, Boix Mansilla and Gardner (2007) define global consciousness as “the capacity and the inclination to place our self and the people, objects, and situations with which we come into contact within the broader matrix of our contemporary world” (p. 57). In their view, global consciousness positions the self along an axis of space, and historical consciousness does so along an axis of time (Boix Mansilla & Gardner, 2007, p. 59). They draw on Rüsen’s (2004) view of historical consciousness and on Damasio’s (1999) neuropsychological understanding of human consciousness as a complex mental capacity that enables the construction of an autobiographical self. Based on those ideas, they claim there are three cognitive–affective capacities at play in historical consciousness: sensitivity “toward objects [and circumstances] in our environment [ . . . ] with which the self comes into contact”; understanding, or the “organization [ . . . ] of mental representations” that enable us to “reinterpret experience” thus “conferring new meaning on our experiences”; and self-representation, or “the reflective capacity to understand ourselves as knowers and feelers—and as historical actors” (Boix Mansilla & Gardner, 2007, p. 58). Rüsen’s (2005) notion of historical consciousness also inspires Nordgren and Johansson’s (2015) conceptual framework of intercultural learning. They propose this framework “to analyse and heuristically raise questions about intercultural dimension in history education, or to guide the practical planning of history lessons” (Nordgren & Johansson, 2015, p. 3). Their framework similarly outlines historical consciousness as three abilities: the ability to experience which is “expressed as sensitivity to the presence of the past around us”; the ability to interpret, which amounts to “mak[ing] sense of the past in the form of history” and thus “understanding the significance (or meaning) of an event, the causes behind a process of change, and the structure of historical narratives”; and the ability to orient, which means utilizing experience and interpretation “for the purpose of making sense of contemporary situations and for identifications” (Nordgren & Johansson, 2015, pp. 4–5). Because I was more concerned with practice than theory, the definition of historical consciousness that guides this review only borrows from Rüsen (2004, 2005) the basic structure that Boix Mansilla and Gardner (2007) and Nordgren and Johansson (2015) draw on, but does not engage with his theoretical work, notably his typology of the ontogenetic development of historical consciousness, his views on historical culture, moral consciousness, and narrative competence, or his disciplinary matrix of historiography and everyday life.
Importantly, there are several assumptions that support this conception of historical consciousness. First, history refers to a body of knowledge, a method of inquiry and a form of social memory, and thus broadly represents a lens through which we as humans can be aware of and understand remnants of the past that people over time have preserved and given meaning to; thus, it is also a transformative lens through which meaning can be made by connecting us with a world beyond our own existence (Becker, 1932; Lee, 2011; Osborne, 2006). Accordingly, and second, consciousness refers, as for Boix Mansilla and Gardner (2007) inspired by Damasio’s (1999) work, to the construction of the subjective mind in mutual interaction with the world, which involves a complex, integrated interplay of embodied mental processes, such as memories, knowledge, reflection, motivations, feelings, emotions, and expectations, that relate our experiences of the world to our changing autobiographical self. This is what is meant by “making the past one’s own.” Students come to their history lessons already possessing this disposition. They enhance it not by progressing toward and ultimately attaining, through proper practice, a more sophisticated sense-making competence, but rather by continually and in no particular order transforming how they relate to the world and how they understand themselves.
This is as much about subjective sensations and perceptions, as it is about reasoning and thinking, as it is about affect and identity, as it is about participating in the situated practices, discourses, and norms of a community, no matter what age and level of education. Such learning takes place not only in the classroom but also, and likely even more so, beyond the classroom, as it is intertwined with socialization into systems of meaning. Thus, and third, to cultivate the disposition of making the historical past one’s own is to learn to make meaning. Several theories, namely, cultural–historical psychology, pragmatism, constructivism, and social constructionism, view learning as meaning making. This review largely embraces this shared notion without subscribing to a single theory. It adopts the comprehensive understanding formulated by Jarvis (2018), who defines learning as the combination of processes throughout a lifetime whereby the whole person—body (genetic, physical, and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, emotions, beliefs and senses)—experiences social situations, the perceived content of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively, or practically (or through any combination) and integrated into the individual’s biography resulting in a continually changing (or more experienced) person. (p. 19)
With these views on historical consciousness and learning as meaning making, I was able to broaden the scope of the review. I was intent on not circumscribing historical consciousness within a narrow conception, precisely because my aim is to consider a pedagogy of historical consciousness in terms of meaning-making practice rather than competence development.
Based on those definitions and assumptions, the guiding question of the review was, “How can students cultivate historical consciousness when they learn history?” This included the following subquestions: what do the abilities of sensitivity to the past, understanding of the past, and self-representation in relation to history entail; what is involved in the processes of experiencing historical temporality, interpreting historical material, and orienting in practical life through history; and how does the experience of temporality foster a sensibility toward the past, how does the interpretation of historical material foster an understanding of the past, and how does orientation in practical life through history foster the representation of self in relation to history? In what follows, I present the parameters I used for searching and selecting literature to answer these questions, as well as the strategies I employed to analyze the selected papers.
I wanted the review to be as comprehensive as possible. My aim was to locate all relevant recent research and include as much variability as possible. I included conceptual and theoretical pieces, literature reviews, meta-analyses, and empirical studies in history education. I also purposely included scholarship that takes diverse disciplinary perspectives and epistemological positions, including psychological, cognitive science, sociocultural, sociolinguistic, and critical theory, and that employs different qualitative and quantitative methodological traditions, including quasi-experimental studies, large-scale surveys, and interpretative, ethnographic, and case studies. Aspects such as the study design, participants, sample, settings, and risk of bias of empirical studies did not constitute criteria for inclusion or exclusion. Though I cast a wide net, an iterative and systematic search process was undertaken from January 2017 to February 2019. To identify and retrieve relevant papers, I conducted electronic searches of bibliographic databases, namely, Education Research Information Center (ERIC) and Google Scholar.
To retrieve papers, I first identified relevant keywords and subject words based on a preliminary search in each database. With that set of terms, I then experimented with different Boolean search strings. Ultimately, the search query I used was TI,AB,SU((“history education*” OR “history didactic*” OR “learning history” OR “teaching history” OR “history instruction*”) AND (“historical consciousness” OR “historical thinking” OR “historical understanding” OR “historical reasoning” OR “historical literacy” OR “historical mindedness” OR “historical culture” OR “heritage education” OR “use-of-history” OR “historical agency” OR “historical empathy” OR “historical narrati*” OR “historical identit*” OR “historical meaning*” OR “historical sense* OR “sense of the past”)). I included peer-reviewed articles and chapters from published academic books and conference proceedings. I limited the search to academic, publications written in English between 1998 and 2018. I did not include non-peer-reviewed practitioner-oriented sources such as instructional programs, materials, or lesson plans. I also left out dissertations and opinion/advocacy pieces. Moreover, I employed a “snowball” strategy to include publications that my database search might have missed by searching reference lists in the relevant papers. I screened the results of my queries by titles, abstracts, and full text to assess the suitability of retrieved articles, removing ineligible or less relevant studies and duplicates at each stage. I selected papers based on the extent to which they provided answers to the following questions in the field of K–12 history education: what kind of meaning do students derive from the study of history; how do students make, communicate and/or perform meaning; what obstacles hinder students from making meaning; what pedagogical practices support student meaning making; and what decisions do teachers make about curriculum and instruction to encourage student meaning making?
As a result of this filtering process, 187 relevant papers were selected for closer examination. Given the heterogeneity of the papers, I employed an interpretive as opposed to integrative approach to synthesis, which as Dixon-Woods et al. (2005) write, helps “achieve synthesis through subsuming the concepts identified in primary studies into a higher-order theoretical structure” (p. 46). My definition of historical consciousness as three meaning-making abilities and processes served as such a structure, and I excluded papers when I was unable to subsume concepts identified in the literature within this frame, or in other words, when there were no codes related to (a) sensitivity toward the past by experiencing historical temporality, (b) understanding of the past by interpreting historical material, or (c) representation of oneself in relation to history by orientating in practical life through history. With the help of Atlas.ti, a qualitative data analysis computer software, I applied strategies of thematic analysis to examine the literature. More concretely, the analysis consisted of cursory and occasionally in-depth reading, writing summaries, coding, and generating descriptive and conceptual categories to facilitate comparison across the literature in order to develop themes. For example, I coded “timeline knowledge,” “sense of chronology,” and “big pictures of the past” in several texts, developed the descriptive category “making sense of historical time” based on those and other codes, and by comparing different patterns I developed the conceptual category “awareness of difference, change and contingency in historical temporality,” thus subsuming those codes in the theoretical structure as “sensitivity toward the past by experiencing historical temporality.” I synthesized these categories into three main themes with subthemes, which are presented in the next section. This coding process was neither linear nor sequential but involved going back and forth between the texts and emerging concepts, patterns and categories. The final selection of literature consisted of 100 papers; these are denoted with an asterisk in the reference list. The results described below do not focus exclusively on empirical findings but also include theoretical, conceptual, and methodological insights. It is worth noting that I do not critique the selected literature for specific ways in which authors discuss and use historical consciousness. The interpretive scope of the review is certainly a limitation in this sense. Integrative reviews on a single theme could allow for critical analysis and nuanced evaluation of the literature.
Results of the Literature Review and Synthesis
Three themes emerged as a result of the review and synthesis. The first theme suggests that experiencing historical temporality to cultivate sensitivity toward the past can be done by negotiating the presence of the past. The second theme suggests that interpreting historical material to cultivate an understanding of the past can be done by inquiring about the past with the help of disciplinary and everyday habits of mind. The third theme suggests that orienting in practical life to cultivate self-representation in relation to history can be done by building a sense of historical being. I elaborate on these themes and their subthemes in the following sections.
Negotiating the Presence of the Past
The object of study of history (i.e., the past) is particular, because by its very nature of being passed, it is somewhat irretrievable; in other words, its reality is beyond direct experience. People cannot do and see things of the past, or have past events and experiences happen to them. However, fragmentary traces and accounts of the past are everywhere. Some are embedded in people’s minds and bodies, or in objects and places of our immediate environments. Others are less tangible and subsist in practices, images, discourses, and knowledge claims in our cultures. Others yet are historical representations preserved in books, institutions, and public sites. Thus, any effort to study history begins with an encounter with such traces and accounts. Making sense of past reality from those encounters relies on a particular experience, not of the actual events of the past, but of the temporality that both separates and connects present reality and past reality. There is a “tension,” as Wineburg (2001) describes “between the familiar and the strange, between feelings of proximity and feelings of distance” which underlies “every encounter with the past” (p. 5). Lowenthal (2000) also articulates this as involving a negotiation between hindsight, on one hand, or the “awareness that knowing the past is not like knowing the present and that history changes as new data, perceptions, contexts, and syntheses go on unfolding,” and familiarity, on the other hand, or the “ability to recognize and situate a substantial common store of references about a consensually shared past” (p. 64). Similarly, my review shows that negotiating the presence of the past involves making sense of historical time, or experiencing the past as distant, and personally connecting to the past, thus experiencing the past as close.
Making Sense of Historical Time: Awareness of Difference, Change, and Contingency
A significant body of research examines how students negotiate the presence of the past by developing an awareness of difference, change, and contingency within historical temporality. However, what exactly is implied in making sense of historical time varies. Some researchers have examined chronological understanding as a way for students to make sense of historical time (Dawson, 2004; De Groot-Reuvekamp et al., 2014; Hodkinson, 2009; Levstik & Barton, 2008; Stow & Haydn, 2000). Chronological understanding is more than timeline knowledge or being able to recall and identify historical events in their order of occurrence. Dawson (2004) and De Groot-Reuvekamp et al. (2014) identified several characteristics of chronological understanding: making an appropriate use of dating systems and basic time-related vocabulary and concepts; sequencing past events, people, places, objects, eras, and situating them in their correct period; recognizing characteristic features of a period; identifying changes, differences, and similarities in the ways people lived; and making comparisons across periods. The extent to which such knowledge and skills should be judged against adult standards and disciplinary conventions is a debated matter. According to Hodkinson’s (2009) findings, subjective time phrases, such as “the past,” “history,” and “a long time ago,” tend to confuse history students, and Hodkinson (2009) urges educators to teach specific time vocabulary and the dating conventions used by historians. By contrast, Levstik and Barton (2008) found that children in their study were able to make temporal distinctions, despite not relying on dates and conventional time terminology. To estimate the time of, and chronologically sequence, a set of images and describe them in relation to one another, the primary students in their study used subjective terms such as “close to now” and “in-between” to sequence images, “the old days,” “back then,” “modern,” and “ancient,” and also drew on cultural or historical background knowledge to place the images in relation to another, such as “when the cowboys were around,” “the rocking fifties,” “like something out of Little House on the Prairie.” These findings suggest that chronological understanding, when looked at from a sociocultural theoretical lens, does not necessarily have to be specific to history or neatly fit formal curricula for students to make sense of historical time in a meaningful way.
In addition to chronological understanding, making sense of historical time, according to a number of studies requires understanding temporal concepts (Blow, 2011; Blow et al., 2012) and the use of relevant cultural tools (Barton, 2002; Levstik & Barton, 2008). For example, several investigations with British students suggest that though they may be able to sequence dates, place people or events in time, and identify the characteristics of periods or eras, students do not necessarily comprehend the nature of change, duration, and concurrence in history (Blow et al., 2012). These studies also indicate that students wrongly apply familiar everyday notions of time to historical material. Namely, they make anachronistic judgments of people’s beliefs and actions, or equate human intentions and actions to their effects and often unintended consequences. To address these issues, Blow et al. (2012) believe history lessons must develop students’ conceptual and procedural knowledge of second-order temporal concepts. Aiming to do so for the concepts of change, continuity, and development, Blow (2011), for example, outlined an empirically grounded six-level progression.
Understanding historical time concepts, however, does not seem to be exclusive to domain-specific thinking. For example, drawing upon a sociocultural perspective on history education, Levstik and Barton (2008) examined semiotic practices related to primary children’s ideas about the past and how it changes over time. Students in their study mostly recognized changes in material culture (technology, clothing, architecture, food, etc.) and also in the social patterns of everyday life. Moreover, students invoked a variety of sources: conversations with family members and friends; family activities, such as vacation trips, visits to museum or historic sites; popular culture, such as television programs, news, movies and shows, the Bible and church, as well as fictional and nonfictional books. Their conceptions of time did not require applying second-order concepts, but rather participating “in history communities” (Levstik & Barton, 2008, p. 115). Similarly, drawing on mediated action theory, Barton (2002) suggests understanding historical time is not confined to the mind of the learner, but can also refer to something students do while engaged in specific tasks or actions with the help of cultural tools, in other words, the material objects, representational systems, procedural rules, and other cultural factors that mediate the interaction between humans and their environments.
Another point to emerge in recent research, which complements research on chronological understanding and temporal understanding, is that students make sense of historical time with the help of a temporal frame of reference (Blow et al., 2015; Duquette, 2015; Howson, 2007; Lee & Howson, 2009; Shemilt, 2009; Wilschut, 2012). Such a frame of reference acts like a “tool for orientation” because it serves to contextualize prior and new historical knowledge (Wilschut, 2012, p. 91). It is often described as a dynamic mental process that involves going backwards and forwards in time, jumping from one reference point in time to another. These usable frameworks are also referred to as images, big pictures or comprehensive narratives of the past (Blow et al., 2012; Blow et al., 2015; Howson, 2007; Lee & Howson, 2009; Shemilt, 2009). Duquette (2015), for example, examined how students refer to and access available historical pasts to consider current and future issues. Her findings suggest that students are not inclined to make temporal references, or alternatively, when they are, they mostly do not connect them to historical knowledge or understanding. Based on such findings, some researchers have proposed frameworks for developing students’ ability to make temporal connections. Blow et al. (2015), for example, proposed a tentative progression model. Wilschut (2012) proposed teaching history using imaginative–associative frameworks, based on results from his design experiment with two groups of Dutch high school classrooms. Teaching in this sense involves building contexts with the help of visual and narrative cues and evocative era descriptions, and then gradually increasing and refining those contexts with prior and new knowledge, to finally incorporate them into a comprehensive associative framework. In sum, to make sense of historical time is also to grasp the past as an interconnected whole.
Personally Connecting to the Past: A Sense of Familiarity and Involvement
In contrast to most of the studies described above, there seems to be another perspective on how students negotiate the presence of the past. This literature stresses the importance of personally connecting to the past and viewing it as close and relatable. This contrast is due in part to differences in conceptual or ideological commitments among researchers. Allowing a sense of connectedness in the study of the past could be seen as opening the door to anachronism and presentism. However, as the following body of research indicates, connectedness does not necessarily entail believing the past is equal to the present or applying present-day lenses and assumptions to interpret the values, beliefs and actions of people in the past. Rather it involves establishing familiarity with the past. This allows students to imagine what things were like and what historical events might have meant for people living them, and also to have certain feelings, beliefs, and emotions with regard to what happened in the past and how that transfers to the present. The body of research described below sheds light on the presence of the past can be negotiated by building such connections, notably: engaging in past-related activities and caring.
First, students can potentially derive meanings from history by engaging in past-related activities in daily life. This is indeed what large-scale nationally representative studies conducted in Australia (Ashton & Hamilton, 2009), Canada (Conrad et al., 2013), and the United States (Rosenzweig & Thelen, 1998) suggest, based on their analyses of how people in general engage in such activities. Though these survey studies were conducted at different times, used different sampling sizes and techniques, and also differed in data collection strategies, all three report that most respondents actively pursued the past. For instance, such activities for the respondents in Rosenzweig and Thelen’s (1998) survey involved: going to a history museum, reading about history, doing research on family history (using diaries, family trees, photo albums, personal memories), visiting historic sites or historic reenactments, watching films or TV programs about the past, or participating in a group devoted to studying, preserving, or presenting the past. Though these activities specifically relate to practices of historical remembrance, other activities relate to history in less obvious ways: learning about something’s origin (e.g., collecting objects, looking at antiques, and reading plaques), inheriting objects from parents/grandparents or keeping objects to pass on to their children, and getting together with family or community members to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving or Martin Luther King day (Rosenzweig & Thelen, 1998).
The three survey reports indicate that when engaging in “history-making activities,” respondents were able to “make the past familiar” (Ashton & Hamilton, 2009, p. 29). In other words, those activities made the past not only present but part of the present: “The most powerful meanings of the past came out of the dialogue between the past and the present, out of the ways the past can be used to answer pressing current questions about relationships, identity, mortality, and agency” (Wertsch, 2000, p. 280). The researchers of these reports argue that school history ought to engage students with history in such ways, like studying family, social, and oral history, as well as enabling them to manipulate and marvel at ordinary and everyday objects of material and immaterial heritage using an experience- and inquiry-based approach (Gosselin & Livingstone, 2016; Henderson & Levstik, 2016; Jones, 2016). For example, Henderson and Levstik (2016) studied the specific curricular context and the teacher’s learning goals in a Grade 5 elementary unit on archeology in the U.S. state of Kentucky. The unit adopted a hands-on disciplinary approach to engage students in the investigation and interpretation of material culture to better understand past human activity. It provided opportunities for object-based activities, an immersive field project, a museum field trip, and lab experiences. Based on comparative analyses of group student interview tasks, the researchers found, among other things, that handling artifacts was “personally motivating” (Henderson & Levstik, 2016, p. 508) for most of the fifth-graders; they enjoyed holding, sorting, and cleaning archeological objects, the element of discovery and puzzlement, and the opportunity to speculate about the ways of life of people so remote from them. This resonates with Lemisko’s (2004) recognition of the importance of “historical imagination” in historical learning and knowing, adapting philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwood’s ideas to instructional strategies. Indeed, she argues that creating an imaginative picture of the past can be facilitated by exploring primary source documents through two sets of guiding questions: a main inquiry question and subsequent questions to critically probe the sources, on one hand; and on the other hand, questions that encourage students to reenact and interpolate from the sources, thus filling the gaps in an informed yet subjective or creative way.
A second way to negotiate the presence of the past by building personal connections, as the literature reviewed indicates, is to feel care and concern in relation to it (Ammert et al., 2017; Barton & Levstik, 2004; Chinnery, 2013; Simon, 2004). From the sociocultural perspective embraced by Barton and Levstik (2004), the notion of care in history education can be conceptualized as a “tool” that helps build affective connections to the past in various ways: caring about people and events because they are interesting and meaningful, caring that particular events developed the way they did and had the impacts they did; caring for people in response to their painful and tragic experiences; and caring to change our attitudes and actions in the present because of what is known about the past. From a philosophical perspective, Chinnery (2013) has conceptualized the notion of care in history education as an ontological stance. Her ideas are inspired by Nel Nodding’s ethic of care and Roger Simon’s conception of living historically. This existential approach toward history helps us recognize that the lives of people who preceded our birth mattered. To “be touched by the memories of others” (Simon, 2004, p. 188) and to care “for others across distances of time” (Chinnery, 2013, p. 255) establishes a relationship with the past in which people feel the moral demand the past makes on the present. As Simon (2004) writes, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of learning to live with ghosts, this is a “relation with the absent presence that—through the trace of testament—arrives asking, demanding something of us” (p. 187). Telling and listening to individuals’ first-hand experiences can be facilitated, for example, by incorporating oral history as a pedagogical tool in the history classroom (Llewellyn & Ng-A-Fook, 2019). Indeed, oral history has become popular since the rise of social history’s emphasis on public spaces and the voices of ordinary people, and thus presents an opportunity to teach students in a way that promotes more affective connections to people in the past and their personal stories grounded in seeing and hearing, as an alternative to a more analytic approach focused on reading historical sources and traces.
Whether it is conceived as a tool or an ontological stance, the notion of care is relevant for meaning making in history in at least two ways. First, it makes the study of the past worthwhile or personally relevant (Barton & Levstik, 2004). For example, based on two classroom investigations with fourth-, fifth-, and sixth- graders, Barton and Levstik (2004) observed that when given the opportunity to look into topics they cared about, many students felt “inspired, moved, and sometime angered” (p. 231) by what they were learning, and also felt motivated to learn more about people and events of the past. They were especially interested in aspects of past daily life (e.g., clothing, education, work, family relations, and immigration) and how people experienced dramatic or extreme events (e.g., war, violence, discrimination, etc.). Many students were interested in topics that allowed them to draw comparisons with their own experiences or those of people they knew. For instance, they were overtly curious about their teachers’ personal timelines, enjoyed building their own personal history projects, and demonstrated interest in children and families from the past during a field trip to a nearby cemetery. Barton and Levstik concluded that caring for the topic of study gave students the possibility to see personal relevance in what they were learning and motivated them to learn more. Second, learning to care for the past helps students engage in the “ethical dimension” of history: to judge past actors and actions; to deal with past violence, injustice, crime, hatred, and suffering of which the effects can still be felt today, and with postconflict reconciliation and reparation; and also to reflect on the duty to memorialize past actors and actions, notably victims and heroes (Seixas, 2015). For example, Ammert et al. (2017) argue that encouraging students to care about the past by teaching about controversial and sensitive issues in history can enhance their reflection on moral culture. Moral culture, according to these researchers, goes beyond explicit instruction about values norms and ethical standards. It can also be found in “narratives and practices with implicit moral content that abound in everyday encounters” (p. 5). Encouraging students to feel care and concern toward the past and present-day issues and historical culture is also a way to discuss and evaluate them, and thus serves as an opportunity to collectively engage in democratic “deliberation over the common good” (Barton & Levstik, 2004, p. 234). In sum, learning situations should create the conditions for students to build personal and affective connections to the past by fostering care for those who lived before them and reflecting on their own opinions and prejudices toward ethically touchy issues in history.
Inquiring About the Past With the Help of Disciplinary and Everyday Habits of Mind
Whereas many scholars acknowledge that a sensitivity toward the past is conducive to meaning making, most of the literature reviewed seems to adopt the view that history education should principally aim to develop historical understanding. This involves actively turning “what happened” into history. Although the experience of temporality helps engage with the past that is everywhere around, interpreting historical material serves to credibly reconstruct what went on in the past or how things came to be the way they are. Through temporal experience, people attribute meaning to the past, but through historical interpretation they represent and organize meaning in a coherent and communicable way. In this sense, as Lee and Ashby (2001) argue, “teaching historical understanding is in part an exercise in giving students a different intellectual apparatus, different assumptions and strategies” (p. 25). Whereas a large majority of researchers would indeed agree with this notion, what such an apparatus includes is still up for debate.
One of the principal areas of disagreement in this debate has to do with the distinction between the view of history as a single domain and as several intersecting domains. On one hand there is the notion that school history represents an exercise in disciplined knowledge. From this point of view, history is a scientific discipline that is guided by particular forms of thinking, specific language, and analytical skills to productively investigate historical material, gather and weigh evidence, form explanations, reach conclusions, and debate differing accounts. The underlying educational goal, from this cognitivist perspective, is to help students, or novices in the domain, to think and perform in ways similar to those of historians, the domain experts. This means progressively transforming their novice beliefs, intuitions, and assumptions into more sophisticated knowledge—not only content or substantive but also second-order knowledge. On the other hand, drawing in turn on a sociocultural lens, history can be conceived as several “intersecting domains, each marked by semiotic practices that provide the context against which history–whether written, oral or visual–is recognizable and meaningful” (Levstik & Barton, 2008, pp.108–109). As such, history is not guided by the aim of moving away from, but rather of building on, students’ everyday knowledge and reasoning, as well as on their surrounding culture and discourse communities. The assumption that students must be able to do what historians do can lead educators and researchers, according to Barton and Levstik (2004), to focus on students’ misconceptions and stereotypical ideas, and consequently judge their understandings to be deficient or flawed. The focus accordingly should rather be on descriptive contexts and visual images, and mediating actions involving the use of effective cultural tools that are already available to learners for dealing with materials related to the past.
Encompassing domain-specific and context-dependent approaches, I suggest, based on the review of literature, that historical understanding can be operationalized by inquiring into the past using disciplinary and everyday habits of mind. I employ the term habit of mind in a broad sense as a mental pattern, developed by the human mind over time and in social context, to direct the mind’s attention and facilitate the perception, comprehension, and evaluation of information. In analyzing literature grounded in narrative psychology, cognitive and social psychology, educational philosophy, and memory studies, three subthemes emerged as salient habits of mind: investigation, narrative, and perspective.
Investigation
A number of studies suggest that students develop historical understanding by learning to investigate historical traces and accounts. Such investigation is essentially based on ways of reasoning with sources of information about the past, such as written documents, images, and objects, so as to examine or produce descriptive, causal, comparative, and/or evaluative claims about phenomena from the past based on empirical evidence. Developing students’ ability to reason in such ways is seen by many as one of the most important goal of history education. In fact, Seixas (1999) argued that “good history teaching [ . . . ] exposes the process of constructing warranted historical accounts so that students can arrive at their own understandings of the past through processes of critical inquiry” (p. 332). This represents a complex process and implies several strategies and skills of historical reasoning. Lee (2011, p. 141), for example, suggests that historical reasoning refers to: asking appropriate questions when encountering primary or secondary historical sources, knowing how to answer those questions, and comprehending the issues involved in constructing or deconstructing historical interpretations as well as the criteria involved in evaluating them. Similarly, van Drie and van Boxtel (2008) outline in their theoretical framework of historical reasoning six main components: “asking historical questions, using sources, contextualization, argumentation, using substantive concepts, and using meta-concepts” (p. 89). The researchers derived these components from an extensive review of empirical research and from analysis of their own data. Frameworks like those are helpful because they lay out key thinking patterns and skills for educators to elicit in their students, each individual element garners its own sub-field of research, with its own empirically based schemes, models of progression, teaching material, and assessment tools (cf. Lee & Shemilt, 2003, 2009; Seixas, 2015; Wineburg, 2001).
As a whole, these elements of historical reasoning encourage students to develop expertise in disciplinary literacy and disciplined inquiry, which are crucial to investigation. To gain proficiency in accessing and processing of historical information and actively constructing knowledge, learners must be mentored and guided into the conventions of inquiry in the domain, including conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive knowledge. As some scholars believe, students must develop historical literacy (Monte-Sano, 2010; Nokes, 2013; Reisman & Wineburg, 2012; Wineburg, 2001; Wineburg et al., 2015). More precisely, students should practice sourcing (i.e., considering the document’s source and purpose); contextualization (i.e., placing the document in temporal and spatial context); corroboration (i.e., comparing the accounts of multiple sources against each other); and close-reading a text. Other scholars, namely Saye (2017, p. 341), stress that classroom instruction should be designed as a supportive inquiry learning environment where learners: are engaged and motivated to spend intellectual effort on problem or project-based learning tasks; learners take part in classroom discourse and collaborative activities to learn the practices and language of historical inquiry; and students’ expertise is gradually developed through coaching and scaffolding, such as modeling investigative procedures and guided discussion. Moreover, domain-specific metacognitive and self-regulated learning strategies can help students monitor and control the cognitive activity required for text-studying and problem-solving according to Poitras and Lajoie (2013).
Although the investigative activities of historical understanding rely on a form of reasoning that has distinct skills and strategies, they also crucially depend on how young people encounter traces and accounts of the past in everyday life. As Lowenthal (2015) suggests, students come across representations of history in several spheres of life, whether at school, in popular culture, family stories, the news media, collective traditions, and public art and architecture. Often, these encounters can be quite different and even conflicting, yet they coexist in various ways. Therefore, although analyzing sources, formulating and substantiating claims, and producing explanations are necessary components of historical understanding, comprehending what makes evidence or accounts historical is equally crucial. As such, students’ beliefs about the nature of historical knowledge and inquiry shape the meanings they attribute to traces and accounts. For example, Boix Mansilla (2005) investigated how a group of 16 exceptional high school students in Massachusetts discerned between two conflicting accounts of the past. Her aim was to portray students’ assumptions about the standards by which a historical account can be deemed acceptable, to assess the degree to which such assumptions form a group of isolated ideas or are part of a cohesive system of beliefs, and to see whether differences in epistemological beliefs could be linked to students’ particular education in science or in history. Content analyses of transcribed interview tasks revealed that students favored one of two distinct epistemological views of history: “reproduce the past as it was” and “organize the past for people today” (p. 94). As a consistency analysis of students’ references to standards of acceptability demonstrates, these distinct orientations tended to operate as coherent frameworks. The former involved (a) a strong emphasis on accuracy in the sense of an exact representation of the past as it really was; (b) a tendency to believe that, eventually, and at least in principle, a complete account of the past could emerge from historians’ ongoing collective inquiry and (c) a view of historians as striving for objectivity (e.g. distinct separation between past and present, fact and opinion, knowledge and value, subject and object). (Boix Mansilla, 2005, p. 94)
The latter also involved “establishing past facts, producing rich explanations, understanding actors’ worldviews and contexts and generating powerful narratives” but was furthermore characterized by (a) [understanding] the role that narrative and explanatory structures play not only in final reporting, but also in the very process of inquiry (e.g., as historians select and interpret sources, as they decide which actors and events to pursue); (b) [awareness] of the temporal distance and perspective that defines historians’ relationships to their object of study. (Boix Mansilla, 2005, p. 99)
Interestingly, Boix Mansilla’s (2005) coherence analysis suggests that the objectivist orientation was more prevalent among students with a scientific disciplinary background, and exemplary history students were more likely to exhibit the constructivist orientation. Thus, epistemological beliefs about accounts and traces have a role to play in the process of interpreting the past, and Lee and Shemilt (2003) have proposed a way to characterize the progression from everyday preconceptions to more sophisticated epistemological understandings of traces and accounts.
Narrative
The nature of narrative and its role in historical interpretation has been largely studied in the fields of historical theory and philosophy of history. Drawing on this literature, as well as scholarship in cultural psychology, sociology, memory studies, and educational studies, the notion of narrative in the field of research on history education generally draws on the idea that narrative is a fundamental way of knowing that helps make sense of human activity as it unravels and acquires meaning over time. The “narrative turn” witnessed in the humanities and social sciences revealed how narrative influences the ways students think, imagine, remember, and make sense of history. Indeed, according to Barton and Levstik (2004), narrative “offers an accessible format to mentally structure historical information/knowledge” because it selects and arranges “facts into a sequence that is not random, but temporally and causally linked, typically, including a setting, actor, agent, goal, and instrument” (pp. 131–132).
A significant body of literature focuses on the role that a psychological narrative competence plays in students’ understanding of history. Contributions to this scholarship generally refer to historical consciousness as a theoretical construct with which to discuss historical–narrative acts of meaning construction (Rüsen, 2004; Straub, 2005). Interested in theorizing and empirically studying the “possible forms of human reasoning” (p. xv), researchers working in this line of thought, according to Straub (2005), are concerned with “whether or how the constitution and representation of time and history necessarily depend on narrative acts of meaning construction” (p. xiv). One of the main arguments in the rationale motivating this research program is that historical consciousness fulfills a crucial temporal orientative function in practical life and thus guides human action (Rüsen, 2004). Rüsen (2004) claims “the operations by which the human mind realizes the historical synthesis of the dimensions of time simultaneous with those of value and experience lie in narration: the telling of a story” (p. 69). These mental procedures are necessary to situate our life in the pregiven historical culture of our society (Rüsen, 2012), and thus have moral–ethical implications. He delineates three subcompetencies, which correspond to three elements that together constitute a narrative: the ability to have a temporal experience, which corresponds to the content of a narrative; the ability to interpret, which corresponds to the form of the narrative; and the ability to orient, which corresponds to the function of narrative. Moreover, Rüsen (2004) suggests that the way in which historical narration realizes its orienting function has implications for an individual’s moral consciousness. He considers four types of historical consciousness, which he furthermore believes can be ontogenetically developed: the traditional (i.e., to abide by pregiven and omnipotent narratives about the origins of personal values and ways of living); the exemplary (i.e., to treat the past as a universal storehouse of cases or examples that embody rules of human conduct and lessons for the present); the critical (i.e., to question and critique what has been passed down, demonstrating moral reasoning, and producing counternarratives); and the genetic (i.e., to historicize temporal change and accept multiple and differing standpoints by viewing them as products of specific historical contexts; Rüsen, 2004). Students can adopt either one depending on their moral orientation, but history education should strive toward the genetic one.
Though Rüsen’s and others’ theoretical reflections have set the tone for research on narrative psychology in history education, some scholars have attempted to provide the discussion with empirical perspective. For example, Kölbl and Straub (2011) conducted a qualitative case study of young people’s historical consciousness. More precisely, they carried out group discussions to examine the content, structure, function and development of their historico-narrative competence. With one group of 13- to 14-year-old grammar-school students in the southwest of Germany, topics of discussion included the Middle Ages, the life of a working-class family at the end of the 19th century, postcards of an aristocratic family or workers on strike, tape recordings of a radio advertisement from the 1950s, and an object of their choice associated with history. They mainly analyzed the transcribed discussion using constant comparison and grounded theory methods. The researchers found that to a large extent students’ thinking about history and historical self-awareness appeared specifically modern, in the sense that they exhibited scientific–methodical standards of rationality. Most students can be said to have a critical understanding of the constructed nature of historical knowledge, which was displayed in their comments and use of language when referencing historical content and media of historical representation, and when employing conceptual instruments and thinking operations to reflect on the concept of time and history and the methods of history. Based on these findings, the authors claim students’ historico-narrative abilities and their development are underrated.
In addition to cognitive narration capacities, history educationists in this review are also interested in the epistemic status and structure of narrated stories students believe as interpreters of history. Building on philosophy of history and narrative theory, Levisohn (2010) suggests students of history, whether professional historians or relative novices, are always dealing with events that are already narrativised by others. [ . . . ] The constructive work of the historical inquirer, then—the creation of historical narratives—is always a product of a negotiation among multiple narratives, both “first level” primary-source narratives and “second-level” historiographical narratives. (p. 12)
Young people attend their history classes already knowing a wide array of preexisting narratives they have encountered throughout their lifetime, which vie for their attention against the ones they study, scrutinize, and construct as part of their lessons. This necessary negotiation process is part of any work of historical inquiry according to Levisohn (2010). The narratives that make up the epistemic landscape of this process arrive in a variety of forms such as textbooks, teachers, family members, politicians, memoirs, novels, films, Internet videos, exhibitions, historical monuments, newspaper articles, social media posts, and so on. However, they are not provided in a “tidy collection of stories, each neatly packaged, with coinciding beginnings, middles, and ends” (Levisohn, 2010, p. 13). Rather, narratives come in different “shapes and sizes,” each with their own authors and their own audiences, some are explicit, whereas others are embedded in larger stories; some are specific, whereas others are archetypes; some are prototypes, whereas others are elaborated (Levisohn, 2010, p. 16). Thus, historical understanding has less to with the attempt to reconstruct the most faithful or accurate narrative, which might be generated and evaluated on the basis of reasoning procedures or standards of acceptability. Rather, it is in the process of negotiation itself, making sense of the “bewildering array” of stories encountered and “weaving” them together (Levisohn, 2010, p. 17), that students derive meaning from history. As Levisohn (2010) argues, students should be taught to become “good interpreters” (p. 17) who carry out interpretation in a creative, responsible, bold yet modest way, with an openness to challenging further negotiation.
Wertsch (2004) makes a similar point. He believes, drawing on Alasdair McIntyre’s idea that humans are storytelling animals and Jerome Bruner’s analysis of narrative as acts of meaning, that stories are not created “out of nothing” (p. 49); they are drawn on from an immense pool of stories and cultural tools available and embedded in the historical, cultural, and institutional environments people navigate in as part of our daily lives. According to Wertsch, who adopts a sociocultural perspective and engages with memory research in psychology, a clear distinction can be made between two levels of narrative organization in collective memory. Indeed, findings from his comparative analysis of historical narratives of Soviet and post-Soviet generations reveals this distinction. On one hand, there are “specific narratives,” which are more focused on episodic recounting of a “temporally ordered set of explicitly mentioned and differentiated events” typically carried out by particular and representative individuals or groups (2004, p. 51). On the other hand, there are “schematic narrative templates” which have generalized forms and functions, constitute underlying patterns in the storytelling tradition of a particular cultural setting, are used unreflectively, and can be instantiated in several ways depending on the collective remembering purposes (p. 54). Both levels play an important role in historical understanding. Moreover, Wertsch (2002) makes a distinction between two stances toward narrative: knowing and believing. He argues that instruction of official national historical narrative might lead students to know the narrative, that is, master cultural tools that enable cognitive functioning, but not necessarily to believe it or use it as “identity resources” (p. 41). Similarly, students who “believe” alternative unofficial versions of the national narrative have appropriated it in a way that helps them build “emotional ties and forms of attachment” to the nation, but they might not have “cognitive mastery” of it (p. 41).
Focusing on the sociocultural process of negotiating multiple narratives, by contrast to the cognitive competence of narration, helps shed light on at least three crucial aspects of meaning making as it pertains to historical interpretation. First, a whole subfield of scholarship deals with the ways in which students negotiate the power dynamics and divisions, which are inherent in narratives that relate to national identity and the sense of belonging in ethnic, racial, or religious groups or a wider imagined community, especially when there is a clash or interplay between official or dominant narratives on one hand, and counter or minority narratives on the other (Anderson, 2017; Barton, 2001; Barton & McCully, 2010; Epstein, 2009; Létourneau, 2017; Lopez et al., 2014; Van Alphen & Carretero, 2015; Wertsch, 2004; Zanazanian, 2015). Second, an increasing body of literature highlights the role of the affective domain in the process of negotiation, showcasing how feelings, intuition, imagination, values, relationality, and desires to identify with what is being studied shape the stories students tell about the past and the ways they interpret it (Colby, 2008; Rudolph & Wright, 2015). A third area of scholarship, though relatively marginal, brings to light the ways in which students’ engage in the process of attributing significance to some stories over others (Barton, 2005; Chinnery, 2010; Kansteiner, 2017; Levstik, 2000; Simon, 2004), especially when it comes to attending to the difficult and serious facts, traces, images and testimonies, or trauma narratives that “demand a reckoning” (Simon, 2004, p. 186) because they “wound” or “haunt” us today (p. 190), thereby participating in a public practice of remembrance as a form of “ethical learning” (p. 187). These three areas within the discussion on narrative as a habit of mind to interpret the past help reduce the importance of cognitive psychological factors in narrative meaning construction. Although the view of narrative as a psychological capability is useful in history education because it provides a framework for historical understanding, the view of narrative as a cultural tool that students and teachers use to make sense of the past and history can engage students in a process of negotiation between different narratives and thereby help them come to grapple with the ways in which historical interpretation can oversimplify, constrain and even distort their historical understanding. For instance, drawing on both psychological and sociocultural dimensions of historical narrative, Zanazanian and Popa (2018) adapted Jörn Rüsen’s concept of narrative competence and James V. Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template to operationalize a pedagogical tool, the narrative tool template (designed by Zanazanian, 2017), for educators to effectively teach historical interpretation through a narrative lens, and also encouraging and validating minority group stories in the teaching of national historical narratives.
Perspective
A significant body of literature argues that to understand history meaningfully, students must develop historical empathy, which requires a rigorous intellectual effort to understand people’s worldviews and the beliefs, values, and attitudes that shaped their thinking and motivated their actions. In the past years, scholars have defined historical empathy, examined how students display it, and suggested instructional methods and strategies to foster it in the classroom. But the notion that human beings from the past had feelings, motivations, and needs, and also might have had a different set of values due to circumstances that differ from those of today, is sometimes difficult to grasp. Because of this, students may experience trouble relating to, or explaining past people’s lived experiences, decisions, or actions, and take presentist or judgmental stances in the attempt to understand them. Findings from a large-scale study that involved 320 British 7- to 14-year-olds (Lee & Ashby, 2001) indicate that students generally explain historical actions, social practices, or institutions based on ideas about change and progress that serve well in everyday life, but that this do not translate well when it comes to constructing inferences about the past. In this study, students’ explanations generally assumed that people from the past might have had wrong beliefs or behaviors because they were ignorant or did not have the technological means, but they eventually realized their beliefs and practices were incorrect or unreasonable, they changed. Such findings inspired the development of a model of progression for developing historical empathy (Lee & Shemilt, 2011) that leads students from very primitive to more nuanced forms of explanations: 1) “explanation by description”; 2) “explanation by assimilation to the known present or by identification of deficits in the past”; 3) “explanation by stereotype”; 4) “explanation by means of everyday empathy”; 5) “explanation by means of historical empathy”; 6) “explanation with reference to mentalités—“forms of life” in which material, social and symbolic cultures are symbiotically linked and mutually sustaining. (p. 41)
These researchers propose that instruction take into account students’ prior ideas and assumptions about why people in the past thought and acted in certain ways, and accordingly help them progress through these levels to achieve more sophisticated empathetic explanations. Without such explanations, students tend to confuse behaviors with actions and actions with outcomes and are tempted to judge past beliefs and actions as irrational, unreasonable, evil, or backward (Lee & Shemilt, 2011). For these researchers, historical empathy is “a way of explaining past forms of life that were different from ours, and a disposition to recognise the possibility and importance of making them intelligible” (p. 48). Because it is about inferring an explanation from knowledge about perspectives, some researchers adopt the view that historical empathy is a distinctly rational ability (Davis et al., 2001; Yeager et al., 1998).
However, according to more recent research (Brooks, 2009; Endacott & Brooks, 2013; Yilmaz, 2007), the view that historical empathy is a knowledge-based analytic ability or achievement, embedded in or resulting from the historical method, is problematic. To walk in the shoes of people living in the past or see the world through their eyes, metaphorically speaking, requires “a skill to re-enact” (Yilmaz, 2007, p. 331). Thus, to really understand the mentality, frames of reference, beliefs, values, intentions, and actions of people in the past, the “process of forming affective connections”
Furthermore, as Nilsen (2016) argues, it is important to recognize that seemingly similar perspective-taking tasks, themes or materials actually require different empathetic acts. In his study, Nilsen asked four young adults from Stanford University to take the perspective of a victim or perpetrator at the Salem Witch Trials and in a Holocaust-era massacre, with the aim of understanding how those individuals “invoke multiple selves” (p. 378) to perform the task. To investigate this question, he drew on the notion of identity, and thus assumed that learners’ perspective-taking is shaped by their socioculturally constructed, dynamic and plural sense of self. Based on an analysis of think-aloud protocols, Nilsen identified four different “self-perspectives” in these individuals’ constructions of past selves, called: the now-self, the hypothetical past self, the imagined past self, and the timeless generalized other. Though such findings relate to adult historical empathy, they nonetheless suggest that engaging with historical perspectives in this vicarious form can enable meaningful historical understanding.
Similarly, the view of historical empathy as analytic or purely explanatory does not acknowledge that there is sometimes a moral dimension involved in the attempt to understand actors and actions from the past. Indeed, some perspectives invite “reflection on how, and why, moral judgments may differ in different periods of time” (Ammert et al., 2017, p. 3). When students are required to understand the differences between ways of thinking and doing of today and those of bygone societies, they cannot always take a neutral moral stance. This is especially true when teaching controversial and sensitive issues that include dilemmas with moral content. Such as studying the actions and consequences of American slaveholders, German Nazis, and Spanish conquistadors. Students might also feel a sense of shame, guilt, or responsibility toward past generations, for example, when they study historical injustices, wrongdoing, tragedies, and crimes of the past. Issues like those raise difficult questions such as the following: Who if any[one] was accountable for the unjust actions in the past, who has a moral right to speak on behalf of the perpetrators and the victims of past injustices now, and can people of a distant past be judged by today’s moral standards, and on what premises? (Löfström & Myyry, 2017, p. 69)
Answering such questions requires inquiring into to the past in a way that goes beyond providing an objective explanation, and has more to do with moral reasoning abilities, seeing potential interconnections between the past, present, and future, and giving history moral meanings.
There is clearly, as Retz (2015) suggests, a “fluid and cross-functional nature of the empathic process–integrating cognitive, emotional, moral and social structures” (p. 214). This process, importantly, is not one of taking perspectives, but rather of recognizing them. Adopting one perspective is practically impossible, because our own present-day perspectives are themselves historically situated, and this influences how people make sense of the past. As Seixas (2015) writes, the questions asked of the past, the language used to talk about it, and the structures used to narrate it all constitute an “unavoidable imposition of the present on a past” (p. 603). This ties to Retz’s (2015) argument for a moderate hermeneutical approach to empathy in history education. He believes that the application of Gadamerian hermeneutics can potentially help history educators see that students to not need to “banish” their own perspectives in order to empathize in history, but rather they can draw on those to engage in a “conversation” with a historical text and also acknowledge how their perspectives provide unique avenues for understanding, not only the historical text, but also themselves, through the “dialogical exchange” (p. 224). Through his reading of Gadamer’s account of tradition, prejudice, and temporal distance, Retz argues that pretending to be able to suspend prejudgment or believing that our own standards and worldviews matter less than those under study, can possibly foster misunderstanding. Indeed, it increases the risk that students fail to notice how their own position shapes the encounter and understanding of a historical other. Thus, his Gadamerian view reveals that “our understanding of people in the past will only acquire meaning in our lives when our questioning of them occurs hand-in-hand with a questioning of ourselves” (Retz, 2015, p. 224).
Building a Sense of Historical Being
A final theme that emerged from the review suggests that students can make meaning in history by building a sense of historical being. The assumption underlying this theme is that an individual person’s life can transcend the limits of birth and death through identifying with the histories of the communities in which their life is embedded. This transcendence is not physical but refers rather to a view from which a person can have an image of who she is, where she is situated in time, and what she does as a participant in ongoing history. Such awareness hinges on our personal needs for orientation in present daily life. As Clark and Grever (2018) write, drawing on Rüsen’s (2004) notion of historical consciousness, this orientation comprehends both external and internal “spheres of life”: the former is “manifested as an awareness of the impermanence of socially created conditions,” whereas the later sheds light on the “temporal dimension of human subjectivity,” and is “accompanied by the development of self-understanding and awareness which takes the form of a historical identity” (Clark & Grever, 2018, p. 182). Thus, an interesting distinction that the small body of literature in this theme raises, by contrast to the two themes described so far, is that historical meaning making is not only a matter of knowing, it is also a matter of being. History education according to Seixas (2011, 2012) ought to pay attention to this ontological dimension of historical meaning making, and thus “promote students’ understanding of their own historicity, their embeddedness in historical processes” (Seixas, 2011, p. 446). Wineburg (2000) refers to this as “developing a historical self” (p. 312). Another way to understand this epistemological-ontological distinction is articulated by Karlsson (2011) in his description of the “duality of man’s encounters with history” (p. 36): On the one hand, we are history, or with a somewhat less deterministic expression, have a history. In this sense, we cannot ever avoid and evade history, even if we sometimes would like to. [ . . . ] On the other hand, [ . . . ] we do history, by actively and genealogically using memories, experiences, and other knowledge of the past, in the service of life and hope for the future. (p. 35)
The literature I present in this final theme draws on different perspectives ranging from cognitive science, to developmental and sociocultural psychology, to memory studies, to critical pedagogy, to existential philosophy and historical theory. It has in common the notion that students can meaningfully engage with history by viewing themselves in relation to ongoing historical developments for the purpose of navigating their everyday life or articulating a sense of self as positioned in time. VanSledright (1998) examined the idea of positionality and its implications for pedagogy. According to him, students bring to the learning context a wide variety of images, ideas, and conceptions about the past, which reflect socioculturally mediated assumptions about the world and reveal hints of a sense of self. These internalized memories, cultural codes, and contexts constitute students’ historical positionality, a frame of reference that guides their interpretations of life experiences. From a constructivist viewpoint, VanSledright argues that such temporal bearings must be taken into account, because they constitute prior knowledge and background experience to build on in the process of learning historical thinking and developing historical understanding. VanSledright grounds his argument on previous empirical evidence that shows how students’ already formed conceptualizations and culturally mediated memories of the past influence what and how they learn history. In his view, teachers who want to facilitate the process of historical understanding ought to take students historical positioning seriously and work with their temporal bearings to encourage learners to interrogate and self-reflect on the ways in which their taken-for-granted points of view, beliefs, and worldviews shape their encounters with and constructions of historical meanings. More precisely, there are three strategies teachers can use. First, they should “question their students” and “teach students how to ask each other questions” (VanSledright, 1998, p. 9). Such questioning requires explaining and justifying positionality-based beliefs and interpretive actions, and builds a community of inquirers who learn to prize interrogations over declarations, to honor the evidence-based contributions of inquirers over textbook claims, and to value continuing curiosity and reflection on their historical positionalities as much as and perhaps more than the possession of deep factual knowledge about the past. (VanSledright, 1998, p. 9)
In addition to questioning, teachers should also “listen closely” to students’ responses, and pay attention to how their positionalities “shift and change (and if not, why not) with each new round of historical study,” which makes way for new questions that are “targeted at students’ reformulated positions” (VanSledright, 1998, p. 10). Third, teachers should engage learners in inquiry into “rich historical contexts” that enable them to recognize their positionalities through past–present analogies to “problematic issues like progress and decline, change and continuity, and assessing human agency” (VanSledright, 1998, p. 11). With these three strategies, according to VanSledright (1998), teachers can better take into account students’ historical positionalities, and in so doing not only contribute to historical thinking but can provide opportunities for “change and growth” (p. 13).
Wineburg (2000) addresses this topic but from a slightly different perspective. Rather than speaking of positionality, he is interested in how adolescents conceive of themselves as “historical beings” (p. 312). With his colleagues (Wineburg, 2000; Wineburg et al., 2007), he interviewed 15 eleventh-grade history students from different backgrounds and three different high schools in the Seattle area, as well as their parents and teachers, and also conducted classroom observation and scrutinized a variety of documents. Utilizing an intergenerational approach and drawing on the notion of collective memory, the analysis focused on how those ordinary individuals thought about the past and used it to interpret their present (Wineburg, 2000, p. 321). The emphasis was not on their historical knowledge, but rather on the complex interplay of “forces that act to historicize today’s youth,” namely, the home, the school, the community, and popular culture (Wineburg et al., 2007, p. 40). An important finding from this project suggests that there are “common beliefs” (Wineburg et al., 2007, p. 42) that are passed down from previous generations through the various channels of collective memory. These are widely shared and understood and have a powerful impact on the way students develop as historical beings. Stories and images are especially impactful, namely, contemporary popular movies and television. As such, the researchers conclude that educators must recognize the importance of these common beliefs and develop a cultural curriculum so as to incorporate them in their lessons; this would make them “better equipped” (Wineburg et al., 2007, p. 68) to help students become “cultural critics and astute observers” (Wineburg et al., 2007, p. 69) of the history they derive meaning from to navigate in the present.
Such findings reinforce the argument against maintaining a sharp demarcation between canonical knowledge determined by the curriculum and collective memory in teaching and learning history. Indeed, recent research has shifted its attention to forms of pedagogy that support more personalized, interactive, and curiosity-driven forms of engagement in historical meaning making, such as film media (cf. Paxton & Marcus, 2018), digital simulations and games (cf. Wright-Maley et al., 2018), and museums, public sites, and informal educational contexts (cf. Stoddard et al., 2018). In sum, to articulate a sense of historical being, students can learn to recognize, question, and likely change their temporal bearings and common beliefs.
The literature converges to support the idea that a culturally responsive learning environment is needed to articulate a sense of historical being, where students’ prior cultural knowledge and experiences are not ignored or neglected, but rather are welcomed and respected, and learners’ interactions with educational contexts outside the classroom are valued, because they can help students communicate something about who they are, what they like, what they believe in, the lives they are living, and what the world is like. In this sense, forms of identification are a crucial component of learning. Recent literature has significantly attended to how students’ identities—personal heritage and background, and their lived experiences as members of different family, ethnic, racial, and cultural groups and as consumers of mainstream and popular media—play a crucial role in their construction of historical knowledge. In fact, in a recent review of the international scholarly literature on how identity shapes historical understanding, Peck (2018) identified five ways in which students’ national, ethnic, and Indigenous identities influence their perspectives and understandings of history: their construction of historical narratives, their evaluation of historical evidence, their judgment of historical actors’ decisions and actions, their perceptions of progress and decline in history, and their ascription of historical significance to people and events of the past. Taking identity into account in building a sense of historical being means acknowledging how students make sense of their own place in, or sense of belonging to, a constructed historical continuum.
The notion of being part of a continuum relates to the idea that historical consciousness, as Clark (2014) writes, has a hereditary function. In this manner, the past is something that is continually and intricately “passed on,” a sort of inheritance that must be negotiated. Based on findings from a large-scale qualitative study called Whose Australia? Popular Understandings of the Past, which sought to “uncover how people negotiate family and community histories as well as national narratives, and why” (Clark, 2014, pp. 90–91), when some participants reflected on what they wanted to received or not, and what they wanted to transmit to the next generation, they experienced “moments of historical connection” whereby they created meaning about themselves or their lives by placing it within “intergenerational life events” (Clark, 2014, p. 93). Moreover, her analysis reinforces what historians have already stressed, which is that “inheritance has its corollary in forgetting” (Clark, 2014, p. 95). Silences and absences, which in participants’ interviews took the form of ellipses or an awareness of narrative omissions in family histories, are also an important part of historical inheritance of sadness, shame, or protection of future generations as Clark (2014) notes.
Interestingly, forgetting, or historical “unconsciousness” (Clark, 2014, p. 97) are also fundamental aspects of historical meaning making when it comes to defining our self in a historical continuum. Research shows that this has implications when it comes to students from minority groups—as demonstrated in Virta’s (2016) study of what adolescents of migrant origins in Finland believe is and should be taught in their history lessons, or in Zanazanian’s (2015) study of how English-speaking adolescents’ interact with the French-speaking Québécois dominant narrative promoted in the curriculum—because it emphasizes otherness and legitimizes pride based on fragmentary private histories. The notion of historical inheritance becomes particularly important when attributing significance to heritage in the context of multicultural classrooms and in communities with “sensitive,” “difficult,” or ‘”dark” pasts, or in other words, collectively traumatic or controversial events (Gross, 2014; Savenije et al., 2014; Trofanenko, 2011; Van Boxtel et al., 2016). Students clearly derive meanings from the past when they engage with historical culture or heritage to orientate in practical life.
Research in this direction points out the need to rethink history education in order to give students opportunities to recognize how history with a capital H relates to their own local or family histories and autobiography. Bellino and Selman (2012), Grever et al. (2008), and Levy and Sheppard (2018) argue for a greater inclusion of student interests and heritage histories in their high school classrooms. For example, interested in exploring “which facets of history were of interest to [students], what history they believed should be taught in schools, their views on the purposes of school history and history in general, and how they viewed their own sense of identity” (Grever et al., 2008, p. 80), Grever et al. (2008) adopted a survey and a comparative approach to examine existing attitudes among a diverse population of students and to identify and measure differences and similarities between students in England and the Netherlands, and also between different groups (i.e., ethnic minority backgrounds, sex, age, level of education, and first or second generation of migration). The authors collected data through a questionnaire distributed to 442 English and Dutch students, aged between 14 and 18 years, attending schools located in metropolitan areas. The authors found that, given a choice among six periods of history, students in both countries and across groups prefer ancient and contemporary history. Moreover, a substantial majority of respondents in both countries and across all backgrounds agree with the statement that knowledge of history is important. More students in England seem to believe that knowing the history of their country is important, yet there appears to be a strong consensus among respondents from all backgrounds for teaching the national past without erasing its darker aspects, and also a feeling of pride in the history of their families. As for what history students prefer and how they perceive their identities, the findings suggest differences between students from indigenous and ethnic minority backgrounds, mainly for national and religious history.
Similarly but on a smaller scale, Levy (2017) examined how three groups (17 students in total) of public high school students (Hmong, Chinese, and Jewish) made sense of three events that were defining in terms of their own historical culture (respectively, the Vietnam War, Modern China, and the Holocaust) and found that those student appreciated the inclusion of their families’ pasts in the official curriculum learned in class. Moreover, the participants were able to engage in rigorous historical thinking about topics that were actually emotionally charged. Findings from Bellino and Selman’s (2012) study also point in this direction. Their qualitative examination of 621 responses by 9th and 10th graders from seven metropolitan locations across the United States to questions asked in a case study about ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia toward the end of the 20th century revealed that students willingly engaged in ethical reflection about historical agency in rigorous ways, namely, by using logical arguments and analytic methods. Based on their findings, the researchers suggest incorporating “moments of disorientation [ . . . ] where students are afforded the space to struggle with decisions made in the past and the choices they themselves face as civic agents and narrators of the past” (p. 198) in history teaching, and thus allowing students to express both personal opinion (What would you have done if you were a historical agent in this particular context?) and moral judgment (What do you think about the actions of this historical agent in this particular context—are they fair and just?) (Bellino & Selman, 2012, p. 193)
without the fear of it leading to unbridled presentism.
Two theoretical models have recently outlined ways in which teachers can enable students’ self-representation in relation to history for purposes of orientation in practical life. First, Nordgren (2016) captures this idea with the concept of use-of-history. In his view, using history refers to the performance of a communicative action, which is articulated from an existing repertoire of cultural resources, and is enacted and given meaning within a web of communicative interactions. Such uses are expressions of historical consciousness and there are three essential reasons, according to Nordgren’s reading of Nietzsche and Rüsen, for using history: “to explain the surrounding world, to form identities, and to exert influence” (p. 488). Based on this concept and speech act theory, he proposes an analytic model to understand communicative acts of use-of-history by distinguishing between encoder, message, and decoder, along four interpretive levels: “1) identify and contextualize the communicative setting; 2) interpret the performative action; 3) interpret the basic reasons as expressions of historical consciousness and historical culture; and 4) interpret the interaction between the actors” (Nordgren, 2016, p. 494). History teachers can use this model, he argues, to encourage students to explore how they themselves and others use history in everyday life for different purposes and also to incorporate aspects of everyday life outside school in history education.
The second model I will mention before concluding this theme is developed by Van Straaten et al. (2018). For these researchers, there is a disjoint between on one hand curriculum developers’ and educators’ desire to provide relevant history education and on the other hand the lack of clarity about what learning activities can support students in transferring content knowledge and historical thinking skills beyond the classroom. The authors sought to address this disjoint between pedagogical goals and practice by investigating how teachers can guide learners toward connecting the past, present, and future. Van Straaten et al. (2015) identified three pedagogical approaches that could potentially help: enduring human issues; longitudinal lines, or long-term developments; and historical analogies (HA). Though these approaches are not new, little empirical research exists on their efficacy. With this study, the authors aimed to explore whether these approaches could feasibly be applied to real-life educational settings without changing daily teaching practice or revising curricular requirements in major ways. For each approach, the authors aimed to understand: 1. To what extent do students apply knowledge about the past in their orientation on current affairs? 2. How do teachers experience applying the approach in their daily teaching practice [ . . . ]? 3. Does application of the approach affects students’ appraisals of the relevance of history? (Van Straaten et al., 2018, p. 51)
To investigate these questions, the authors drew on a pragmatic lens. Pragmatism evaluates theories and ideas based on their practical relevance and outcomes. Accordingly, the authors employed educational design research. This practice-oriented approach emphasizes developing and evaluating educational interventions or innovations, in context and in close collaboration with teachers, to generate products and theories that improve educational practices. The researchers conducted three different case studies, each consisted of teaching a lesson unit with one of the three approaches. They collected data from five classrooms and four teachers in two Dutch secondary schools. Data collection included both quantitative and qualitative methods. Mixed methods is indeed a common methodological choice in pragmatic educational inquiry. For the first question, the authors used writing tasks in pre- and posttest settings, as well as semistructured interviews with 14 randomly selected students from one case study for the first question. For the second, they used a closed format questionnaire and open-ended interviews. For the third, they administered a 24-item questionnaire, the Relevance of History Measurement Scale in pre- and posttest settings for the third question. Data were analyzed through multiple methods, namely, content analysis, thematic analysis, and statistical analysis. The authors found that of the three approaches, HA appeared to enhance students’ use of the past toward reflecting on contemporary contexts, and also elicited their enthusiasm. All three approaches were useful and interesting from the teachers’ perspectives, but HA by contrast was less complicated to work within the existing curriculum and time constraints. Finally, only enduring human issues apparently had a positive effect in shifting students’ perceptions of history’s relevance.
Conclusion
I defined historical consciousness at the onset of this article as the disposition to engage with history so as to make meaning of past human experience for oneself, and I conceptualized it as three interrelated abilities (i.e., sensitivity toward the past, understanding of the past, and representation of oneself in relation to history), each with a respective but interlinked meaning-making process (i.e., experiencing historical temporality, interpreting historical material, and orientating in practical life through history). As a result of my review and synthesis, I found that historical consciousness can correspondingly be operationalized for education through: the negotiation of the presence of the past, that is, its distance on one hand and its closeness on the other; the inquiry of historical material with the help of disciplinary and everyday habits of mind, namely investigation, narrative and perspective; and the building of a sense of historical being. The first theme indicated that students should learn to make sense of time by increasing their awareness of difference, change, and contingency through time. Activities that enable them to develop chronological understanding, understanding of temporal concepts, and temporal orientation via an associative framework of references are helpful in this respect. Students should also learn to personally connect with traces and accounts of the past through activities that help them take part in past-related activities and develop care and concern toward the past. The second theme suggested that to develop historical understanding students should develop mental patterns that enable: the investigation of traces and accounts (i.e., reasoning with sources of information about the past, which involve specific strategies and skills, historical literacy and disciplined inquiry, as well as a constructivist approach to history); the cognitive competence of narration and the sociocultural negotiation of multiple narratives; and the recognition of perspectives, both past and present, through activities that help students build explanations of the worldviews, beliefs, values, intentions, and actions of people in the past but also examine their own feelings and emotions, their values, and their historically situated assumptions about people and societies. The third theme indicated that students should communicate who they are, where they are situated in time, and how they may act as participants in ongoing history. In this respect, instruction should use disorienting dilemmas, dialogic questioning, and a culturally relevant curriculum to encourage students to reflect on their historical positionality, identities, heritage, family histories and interests, and focus on activities that build connections between the past, present, and future and examine how history is used in communicative acts.
This study constitutes one of the first systematic reviews on historical consciousness with the scope of operationalizing the construct for meaning-making practice. The resulting themes represent a view of learning as the making of meaning for oneself, rather than the development of competence. Given that historical consciousness has principally been operationalized through a competency-based approach, these results are particularly pertinent for history education research. I call upon the scholarly community to consider the potential of this approach to complement students’ development of competencies, and possibly even motivate it. Indeed, a meaning-centered approach could promote a conscious engagement with what is being learned, whereas a competency-based approach could promote a disciplinary or expert stance toward it. The former would enable students to see the value of what is being learning to make sense of their world, and thus how and why it may be worthwhile to learn it, whereas the latter would enable students to master the domain-specific knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking that help effectively respond to a subject-based problem and to transfer those to new problems. There seems to be a clear distinction between the two and a clear purpose for each. As Nordgren (2017) points out in an article in which he argues for the use of Michael Young’s concept of “powerful knowledge” in intercultural education: Disciplinary skills and concepts are crucial in giving us insights beyond common sense and finding perspectives that can be generative, but it is equally possible that a disciplinary approach can reduce history to exercises of sourcing or exegetics without any relation to something living or meaningful. (p. 669)
In closing, the three themes point toward promising directions in building this relation and outline a vision of history teaching and learning that makes history relevant to students’ lives. Deeper examination of the complex relationships between these pedagogical processes and practices, combined with empirical research in varied educational settings would greatly contribute to achieving this vision.
Footnotes
Note
This research was financially supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture under Grant 197281.
Author
NATHALIE POPA holds a PhD in Educational Studies from McGill University, 845 Sherbrooke St W., Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 0G4; email: nathalie.popa@mail.mcgill.ca. Her previous publications include a cowritten article with Dr. Zanazanian on a narrative pedagogical tool that aims to help students produce personal histories of belonging to their community, published in LEARNing Landscapes (2018 Special Issue: Teaching and Learning with Stories, 11(2), 365–379), and a literature review article on the concept of historical consciousness in Canadian history didactics, published in the Canadian Journal of Education (2017 Special Capsule on Historical Consciousness, 40(1), 1–25).